Former Clinton White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles and retired Wyoming GOP Sen. Alan Simpson are lobbying hard to build support for their deficit-slashing effort on Capitol Hill, despite their inability to garner a supermajority on their commission.

The controversial report couldn’t win a supermajority vote in its commission’s final meeting, it got a major political lift this week with the imprimatur of Senate Budget Committee chairs (past and present) Kent Conrad, D-ND, and and Judd Gregg, R-NH.

“This is a moment of truth,” Conrad said, calling the report “genuine bipartisan compromise.” Gregg said, “In the end … I think this document becomes the memo that controls the meeting, to use Henry Kissinger’s words…. We’ve reached a point where it’s time to govern. It’s that simple.”

Liberal groups are howling; all the deficit-hawk groups are glowing. Republican leaders are under pressure to promise action on the report when they take power, but have said little.

Despite the failure of co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson to round up the 14 votes needed to call it a consensus, but their political maneuvering and the assent of Conrad and Gregg have ensured that this report is setting the terms of the debate rather than heading for a shelf to gather dust.

Heading into today’s vote by the White House-sponsored bipartisan commission on its deficit reduction plan, key Republican Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., has signed on. It’s a critical move given Coburn’s reputation as a hard-core conservative who is very influential with his party on budget issues. It means a top Republican is dissing his party’s dogmatists, such as the once very influential Grover Norquist at Americans for Tax Reform.

A critical mass appears to be forming around a $4 trillion deficit cutting plan that just months ago would have been DOA in DC, slaughtering as it does entire herds of sacred cows. Incoming House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., said he would incorporate some of the plan into the GOP budget (though he won’t support the plan in its entirety). The White House has promised the same.

Democrats are also showing a willingness to bend, including Sens. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., and Rep. Xavier Beccerra, a Los Angeles Democrat and rising star in his party. Both sit on the commission, and are straying glaringly from lame duck House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s swift dismissal of the plan as “simply unacceptable.” This could mean that Pelosi may no longer be setting the agenda on spending and taxes.

“History has not been kind to great nations who borrowed and spent beyond their means. Doing nothing will, sooner rather than later, guarantee that this nation becomes a second-rate power with less opportunity and less freedom. The plan developed by the debt commission, while flawed and incomplete, will help America avoid this fate and secure freedom for future generations.”